Free Market Friday: No reason to fear ‘model’ legislation

Coastal elites love to pick on red state legislators. Witness USA Today’s recent story that “thousands of bills dreamed up and written by corporations, industry groups and think tanks” have been filed in legislatures across the country and are “quietly advancing the agenda of the people who write them.”

Staff at USA Today, The Arizona Republic and the left-wing Center for Public Integrity examined legislation filed in all 50 states using a computer to detect similarities. They reported at least 10,000 bills were based on model legislation with around 2,100 of those bills signed into law.

That may sound like a lot, but to get the total that high they had to go back eight years. How many bills were filed in all state legislatures and Congress during that time? USA Today reports it was nearly 1 million. That means model bills were 1 percent of the total, and the share signed into law represented two-tenths of 1 percent of all measures filed.

USA Today fails to show that legislative drafting has been outsourced to any meaningful degree. More importantly, model legislation is not necessarily a bad thing.

Oklahoma passed a model right-to-try bill that allows desperately ill people to try to save their lives with experimental medications. That’s a good idea, so who cares if the legislation passed elsewhere first? Many criminal justice reforms are based on ideas that have worked in other states. Justice should be blind, but not lawmaking.

In both football and politics, people freely swipe ideas. No one criticizes NFL coaches for using air raid concepts pioneered by Hal Mumme at Iowa Wesleyan College starting in 1989. Why criticize legislators for keeping their eyes peeled for good policies? That’s how a free market of ideas is supposed to work. Legislation should be considered based on whether it’s a good idea – and whether it will work – not based on who wrote it or whether some other state passed it first.

In Oklahoma, every bill is vetted by staff attorneys, posted online, debated openly, and given multiple recorded votes. There is nothing nefarious or hidden about any of this, despite what some activists with bylines might want us to think.

Jonathan Small serves as president of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs (www.ocpathink.org).